August 23rd, 2008 posted by Bender Rodríguez
Wherein I detail the series of events that lead me to purchase their album online in mp3 format at amazon.com and their wonderful shopping experience that ensued.
I was listening to The Story this week and I heard a great interview with Rupa Marya, a physician based in San Francisco who leads the musical group the April Fishes. During the interview, she mentioned one of her songs that I thought was called "Joder". I was laughing my butt off, as "joder" is not exactly the type of word that public radio fans would expect to hear over the air waves, even if it is a Spanish word and most listeners would not recognise it. I listened to the song, which has the refrain "si se puede", and which rails against the inequities of US immigration policy, among other things. I thought, what a perfect title for that song, and wanted to buy the album.
I found the Fishes' website and followed a link from it to amazon.com. I could purchase the entire album for 9 bucks, but I would have to install their MP3 downloader software. As I am running Ubuntu, I did not hold out hope for this to work, but gave it a go. To my surprise, amazon provides a Debian installer that works like magic. Within minutes I had the entire album downloaded with one click and I was off and running. Now if only the price for albums were more like a buck. They might actually receive more business from the likes of those of us who find it more economically feasible to download our music using BitTorrent.
In the end, I found out that the song is actually entitled "Poder".
"We are thoughtful, inquiring, and reflective, and we are the watchmen who guard against bad ideas in order to discover good ideas, consumer advocates of critical thinking who, through the guidelines of science, establish a mark at which to aim."
Michael Shermer